Solarpunk Travel
- • 94%english.elpais.com Europe jumps on the train
More and more people are using this form of travel to get around the continent, using high-speed routes and a network of night trains that continues to expand. We traveled from Madrid to Prague and witnessed how the future of European transportation is clean and fast
cross-posted from: https://lemmy.zip/post/22064287
> > More and more people are using this form of travel to get around the continent, using high-speed routes and a network of night trains that continues to expand. We traveled from Madrid to Prague and witnessed how the future of European transportation is clean and fast
- mas.to The Man in Seat 61 (@seatsixtyone@mas.to)
Attached: 2 images BREAKING: @EuropeanSlpr to launch a Brussels-Venice train twice a week in February & March next year via the scenic Brenner Pass, with couchettes, sleepers & (yay!) dining-car. Fares tba, booking opens next month. Recommended Eurostar connection leaves London St Pancras at 11:04.
YouTube Video
Click to view this content.
That kind of plane could very much fly trans Atlantic with stop overs in Iceland or Greenland or further south from Kap Verde or Guinea to Brazil.
- www.strongtowns.org If We Want a Shift to Walking, We Need To Prioritize Dignity
Why does walking feel so intuitive when we’re in a city built before cars, yet as soon as we return home, walking feels like an unpleasant chore that immediately drives us into a car?
Originally posted at Hacker News.
- media.viarail.ca 50 YOUNG HACK CLUB CODERS CHAMPION A SUSTAINABLE FUTURE ON VIA RAIL’S THE CANADIAN | VIA Rail
_____________________________________________________________________________
I would be stoked to get to join this trip as a kid.
- www.thrillist.com The First Carbon-Positive Hotel in the U.S. Is Extremely Trippy Inside
The architecture is meant to resemble Colorado's famous Aspen trees.
Only bummer is they won't have all-vegan restaurants.
YouTube Video
Click to view this content.
- • 96%www.afar.com Tall Ships Are a Slow Travel Adventure—Here’s Where to Find Them in the U.S.
A historic experience? Yes, and lots of fun.
- townlift.com Aspen cyclist embarks on 600-mile ride from Utah to Idaho to promote climate action and sustainable travel - TownLift, Park City News
SALT LAKE CITY, Utah – Starting on July 12, Jacquelyn Francis of Aspen will bike 600 miles from Utah to Idaho to inspire others to act on the climate
- • 64%youtube.com Flight free travel from US to French streets
Who says you need to fly to France for those charming French streets, boulangeries, patisseries, historic buildings, and the pastoral countryside? Quebec was...
Just wanted to run this idea past folks.
If you generally boycott Boeing over their safety scandals or over their extreme right lobbying contributions that support that climate denying political party, but you find yourself taking a Boeing anyway (e.g. your employer books you on one), why not show up to board the plane wearing a wing suit?
The idea is to convey the idea that a panel can fall off at any moment, inconveniently suck you out, and you have a sudden unplanned need to fly on your own. A parachute is likely too bulky. It’s kind of a way to make a statement.
I’m not sure if the wing suit can be comfortable enough to sit in and actually simultaneously somewhat functional. Would we have to choose between sufficient comfort and sufficient gliding capability, or could we have both?
It doesn’t have to be ugly. Consider those Nepalese and African pants with knee-high crotches. Those are borderline wing suits for the bottom half. When legs are spread, it could reveal something like “Boeing passenger safety pants”.
I suppose the big question would be: would a Boeing pilot exercise their discretion and refuse to carry such a passenger?
- inreview.com.au Musician's travelogue explores an unusual rail trail to Europe
Why fly to Europe when you can catch a few trains and it will only take you 89 days? If you're lucky
Met this guy walking across France in the cevennes, he started walking with his two donkeys at his home in Colmar, Alsace and was on his way to visit his kids at their farm at the foot of the Pyrenees. He was following the GR7 hiking trail.
- • 88%www.independent.co.uk Margate to Marrakech: A flight-free holiday to Morocco
A flight-free adventure between the UK and North Africa offers the romance of slow travel alongside the opportunity to get to know some of Europe’s most famous artists, finds Diana Jarvis
- • 84%
Repurposing old smartphones to assist your primary phone with navigation (increasing the range)
The problem I have is on long trips (via bicycle or on foot) my phone’s battery hits 15% remaining and screen dims mid-trip, which is essentially blank in daylight when navigating. I’m in airplane mode with wifi also disabled. So the only power consumers are the screen and the GPS receiver. Yet I’m still forced to power down, swap batteries, lose the clock time (which GPS strangely fails to correct), and wait to reacquire a GPS signal. Then OSMand remembers the route parameters but forgets the route (a bug). And because the phone’s time is 1am, I have to either update the time or force OSMand into daytime mode.
Big hassle and unwelcome interruption. I see 3 fixes:
-
Repurpose an old phone to receive the GPS signal and feed the lat/long over bluetooth to your navigation phone. Since a bluetooth radio in receive mode consumes around ⅒ the energy of a GPS receiver, the main phone battery will last much longer. The GPS phone need not power a screen, so it can obviously run quite long if it’s only powering GPS chips and bluetooth in tx mode. (refs: GPS uses 13-38%, bluetooth uses ~1.8% / 17.9mA on one chip; math-intensive research I didn’t read because it would make my brain explode)
-
Attach an external USB battery. I reject this because I don’t want to strap another box to my arm and run a cable into my water resistant phone strap.
-
Get an Android-compatible phone with a dual mode LCD, so a low-power e-Ink mode can be used in daylight. I reject this because I boycott Russia and IIRC only Russia has phones with dual mode displays. I would perhaps be open to buying just a raw dual mode screen (not from Russia or Israel) and then use it to replace a cracked screen on a 2nd hand phone.
I guess it’s debatable relevance to solorpunk travel. Two phones in case 1 consumes a little more power overall but it keeps a phone out of the landfill and makes it useful.
update --- Found an f-droid app that looks good for this. It will even run on AOS 2 which means quite old phones can be used to feed GPS coords over BT. This app could be useful as well.
Question: I always disagree to “Google’s location service” nag -- (using towers and/or wifi APs) to supplement navigation (no idea what gets shared with Google and also don’t want wifi or GSM eating battery).. but if a separate phone is feeding the fix, then the power problem goes away. But there’s still the sharing problem. Is there a way to harvest the tower info before a trip anonymously and use it without feeding Google?
update 2 --- I tried using an external bluetooth GPS device -- one that is dedicated to that purpose from the palm pilot days. I was able to pair to it over bluetooth but after pairing it would not connect to it for any kind of session. It’s as if the android does not know what to do with a GPS server.
Some instructions out in the wild say: “In the Android playstore fetch ‘bluetooth GPS’ or ‘bluetooth GNSS’ App.” Well, I don’t do Playstore.
One step is to go into settings → “Developer options” → Debugging → Allow Mock location → enable. That makes no difference for me.
The instructions also say: “Before you launch your GPS software, launch ‘bluetooth GPS/GNSS’, click “connect” and check “Enable Mock GPS Provider” -- which is a non-starter for those not inside Google’s walled garden. Guess I need a free-world variation of this app which apparently uses the external GPS device to feed a mock location. I found these two apps:
- GPSTest - this is an apparently useful test app but seems unable to use external devices
- RtkGps (abandoned¹) - claims to make a connection over bluetooth to an external GPS, but does not work for me. Mentions SiRF IV but not SiRF III, which may be my problem. IIRC, RTK was a SiRF III competitor.
¹ This repository has been archived by the owner on Mar 28, 2023. It is now read-only.
-
YouTube Video
Click to view this content.
The Byron Bay Railroad Company runs the world's first 100% solar-powered train. It wouldn't work everywhere - but in the bright sunshine of Australia, it might just be the right tool for the job.
More about the railroad: https://byronbaytrain.com.au/
Though this photo fits the theme kinda nice.
Was in croatia, last summer.
I like travelling by bike, but i am not the biggest fan of doing roundtrips, i much prefer moving further and further away. So on longer trips i will end up way far from home, and since travelling by train across Europe, can be a real ordeal (especially with a bike), i sometimes take a plane back home. I guess busses would be an option too from some locations, i personally absolutely hate travelling by bus though. Weak excuse i know.
I am able to rationalize to myself that it is ok to take that flight, i spent now weeks doing low impact travel and can end it with a boom and still probably had less impact then with my regular life at home (i have not really done the calculation tbh). Of course, if it is reasonably easy to get home by train i will definitely prefer that, and i absolutely don't always end up taking a plane.
What are your thoughts on this? Do you ever take a flight?
YouTube Video
Click to view this content.
YouTube Video
Click to view this content.
- grist.org In Denver, e-bike vouchers run out as fast as Taylor Swift tickets
The city estimates that its wildly popular e-bike subsidies are helping to eliminate 170,000 vehicle miles traveled per week.
🇩🇪 Was sind eure Reiseerfahrungen mit #interrail in der #Türkei ?
🇫🇷 Quelles sont vos expériences de #voyager avec #interrail en #turquie ?
🇬🇧 What are your experiences #traveling by #interrail in #Türkiye ?
- • 98%momentummag.com Paris cycling numbers double in one year thanks to massive investment and it's not stopping
The report delves into the nuances of Parisian cycling culture, exploring the vibrant community of riders who navigate the city's streets
Just heard a quick blurb on BBC that another panel fell off a Boeing mid-flight which landed in Oregon. No harm done.. wasn’t noticed until after they landed. United Airlines.
I think it’s important for these stories to continue getting attention because there are Boeing patrons who think “they’ll fix that problem and get it sorted”. They seem to have a lot of loyalty as they proudly claim Boeing is safe to fly on.
Or maybe I should ban myself from posting about Boeing here. My rationale is that Boeing is extra harmful for the environment because amid their #greenwashing they are an #ALEC member who finances #climateDenial. And bashing ecocidal travel is fair game for a sustainable travel community. And I guess this community is low volume enough that it’s good to have a heartbeat of sorts to give a sign of life here.
update --- I just heard Boeing still sells t-shirts that say “if it’s not Boeing, I’m not going”. Surely they must be having a hard time selling those now. Someone could probably make a fortune selling a modified version of that at airports with one of the “not”s striken (
not).- edition.cnn.com Boeing 737 Max: The passengers boycotting the embattled airplane | CNN
Some frequent travelers are refusing to fly the Boeing 737 Max – the plane under scrutiny for safety flaws that have come to light following the Alaska Airlines incident. Here’s why they would ‘absolutely not fly that plane.’
If you scroll down to Torleif Stumo there’s a quite interesting story. I was amazed that an aircraft that started to taxi returned to the gate and reconnected to let a passenger exit who discovered he was on a 737 max -- and that the airline rebooked him at no extra cost. Then I realized after my speed-reading what I missed: this guy was the brother of a passenger who was killed in the Ethiopian Airlines flight. I wonder if it was Ethiopian Airlines that he was gave him the extra sympathetic treatment.
The article starts with another passenger demanding to exit after the gate disconnected, upon finding he was on a 737 Max. They omitted how he was treated w.r.t costs. I’m sure all airlines probably have in their contract of carriage a clause that allows them to change aircraft and presumably the passengers have no rights. I say that because you aren’t even guaranteed a layover. E.g. if your ticket is from New York to California via layover in Vegas, and for whatever reason the airline needs to reroute you last minute connecting in Detroit instead, the contract of carriage allows them to make changes is substantial as that and passengers have /no rights/ in that regard so long as the airline reaches the final destination on the correct day.
booking sites withhold aircraft --- It always annoys me when a air travel booking site withholds the aircraft info. I used to be able to find the matching flight on matrix itasoftware but that site seems to be getting less reliable (random acts of tor hostility). The article mentions an effort underway to change that.
Relevance --- Superficially this article seems unrelated to sustainable travel. But Boycotts on Boeing are actually inherently pro-environment because Boeing is an #ALEC member and ALEC finances the #climateDenial movement. Boycotting all air travel would be as well, but some are forced to choose the lesser of evils in which case avoiding Boeing is at least more sustainable (avoids supporting a green-washing ALEC member).
Not sure if commuting really counts as “travel” related but hopefully it’s interesting enough.
- • 100%www.euronews.com Spain bans short-haul flights where you can take a train
It isn’t yet known how many flights will actually be impacted by restrictions.
⚠ Link #enshitification warning: #euronews has a forced agreement type of popup in some browsers (TB). I suggest either Ungoogled Chromium or lynx. Lynx warns “bad html” but it renders fine.
This is being cross-posted to several places so I won’t bother to list them here.. but there are a few discussions on this if you look around.
- jonworth.eu How green are Europe's railways? - Jon Worth
At one level the answer to the question posed in the title of this tweet is obvious: very green. This 2020 report (PDF) by the European Environment Agency puts some numbers on it, summarised in this graph: I might quibble with some of the numbers here, but the overall picture […]
Solarpunk travel is intended for /sustainable/ travel, right? So where can we discuss travel with no sustainability relevance? I only consider proper decentralized non-Cloudflare instances. This is what found as free world venues for travel chatter:
- !solarpunktravel@slrpnk.net ← sustainable travel focus
- !traveltips@feddit.uk ← Europe focus
- !travel@eviltoast.org
- https://lemmy.globe.pub ← whole instance devoted to travel (⚠but note there is an instance-wide no politics rule)
The places other than !solarpunktravel@slrpnk.net are ghost towns but that’s nothing that can’t be fixed with a bit of cross-posting. I suggest putting them in the sidebar as related communities.
YouTube Video
Click to view this content.
- theshovel.com.au Screwdrivers Now Permitted On Boeing Flights, To Allow Passengers To Help With Maintenance — The Shovel
Travellers on Boeing 737 flights will be allowed to bring on-board screwdrivers, drills and any other tools deemed necessary to keep the doors from flying off.
(This is good news for people who trust Boeing more than medical workers. You can bring your own screwdriver.)
</satire> </fakeNews>
The serious narrative is shocking:
A Boeing mechanic failed to tighten the bolts on a door-size "cabin plug" that blew out on an Alaska Air 737Max flight. The aircraft had cabin pressure warnings onboard for some time, so instead of investigating/fixing, the airline simply 'restricted' the plane from 'long flights over water' so it could land quickly. No joke.
- www.hawaiiseaglider.org The Hawai’i Seaglider Initiative | A New Approach to Travel Between the Islands
The Hawai’i Seaglider Initiative (HSI) is a group of local government, private sector, and community stakeholders working to increase awareness, understanding, and adoption of seagliders in Hawai’i.
- • 100%www.nytimes.com In Europe, Trains Are Full, and More Are on the Way
Amid concerns about climate change, demand for rail service is strong, and both governments and private investors are trying to keep up. Even Eurostar may see competition on its London-Paris route.
- reasonstobecheerful.world The Life-Changing, Solar-Charged Power of 'Regenerative Travel'
Meet the intrepid e-bikers who are helping others to travel ecologically and give back along the way.
- crossborderrail.trainsforeurope.eu #CrossBorderRail The Board Game - #CrossBorderRail
In mid December 2023 I was working on a documentary with a Dutch film crew and the producer asked me “Jon, did you ever think of making a board game to explain the problems with international rail in Europe?” I had not ever thought of that, but then my mind […]
- • 91%electrek.co The Dutch are riding their bikes on two new solar cycle paths
Two solar cycle paths came online in the Netherlands, and they're the country's first to have 1,000 square meters of solar surface area each.
- vid.puffyan.us The World’s Biggest Aircraft Can Fly for a Week
Visit https://brilliant.org/scishow/ to get started learning STEM for free. The first 200 people will get 20% off their annual premium subscription and a 30-day free trial. It's a bird, it's a plane, it's a... peach emoji? The Airlander 10 is the world's biggest currently operational aircraft, and ...
🍑
cross-posted from: https://slrpnk.net/post/4750716
> Human hibernation has made some strides recently. I think a year or so ago a Wired mag article said the only significant unsolved problem is shivering. They have a cocktail of drugs that makes hibernation possible apart from the fact that people shiver at low temps. > > If they solve this, I will gladly prefer to be shipped as cargo on a sail boat or airship so long as someone tends to a heart monitor to ensure a few heartbeats per min or whatever is still happening. No more Gestappo airport security, stresses of delayed flights, screaming babies, people eating Camembert cheese within 5 meters of you. You age at like ⅓ the rate in hibernation (or something like that). I’d gladly trade a week of reduced useful lifetime in exchange for a later death (experiencing more of the future than otherwise possible). The idea of being able to easily flip the middle finger to Boeing would also be a nice perk. (#boycottBoeing)